Custom eyewear startup King Children raises $2 million – TechCrunch

Custom eyewear startup King Children raises $2 million – TechCrunch

Eyewear can be a statement-making, attention-grabbing fashion accessory — if done right. King Children, a custom eyewear startup emerging from stealth today, aims to give everyone unique, custom designs made for them, by them.

Harnessing the power of 3D scanning and printing technology, in addition to augmented reality, King Children aims to create custom frames that fit your face perfectly.

“One of the things we felt strongly about is there are so many consumer brands that don’t treat people of diverse backgrounds equally,” King Children co-founder and CEO Sahir Zaveri told TechCrunch. “They make products designed for these imaginary, average people. They don’t end up fitting diverse people as well. What we started to think about was creating a brand and platform that by definition would treat every single person equally.”

To get started, you use the KC app to take a 3D scan of your face. From there, you can design your own pair of glasses based on the shape of your face, structure and hairstyle. Then, you can adjust the lens height and width, nose bridge, nose pad position, pantoscopic tilt, frame wrap and more. Next, you select whether they’ll be sunglasses, prescription or blue blocker lens. You can also add an inscription up to ten characters. Within two weeks, you’ll have your new pair of glasses.

“One thing I personally love about our model is we run a zero-inventory model, which is a huge change in the world of consumer retail,” Zaveri said. “We own no stock whatsoever. When trends change, we have no retail we have to get rid of.”

The part where I try on some glasses via AR

In total, King Children costs $125 for a pair of glasses. In the event you don’t like the way the glasses turnout, King Children offers free returns.

“An extremely important aspect of this was that we needed to make sure we were able to deliver this product to the mass market,” Zaveri said. “It can’t be prohibitively expensive so that we would lose the point of what we were trying to achieve.”

But while Zaveri stressed the importance of diversity and access, King Children only works with the latest iPhones — the iPhone X, XS, XS Max and XR. The cheapest one, the XR, has a starting price of $749. Eventually, King Children will look to support all devices that enable facial scanning with accuracy down to the millimeter.

King Children uses “engineering-grade plastic” for its glasses, Zaveri said, which enables the company to “make high-quality frames that are exceptionally light but strong.”

“As you can imagine, eyewear for us is only the beginning,” Zaveri said. “But I would like to stress that we’re really focused on eyewear. We’re not actively working on any other products.”